this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
28 points (93.8% liked)
Linux
47527 readers
1474 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
OK maybe what I meant was a packaging format and not a package manager, above there was a user that mentioned that all distros have their quirks and kinks, if GNU created a package manager that worked perfectly at first time maybe it's adoption would go across the distros but as u said to make it perfect the first time is something hard and even harder on early days where nothing was set on stone and there would be always the odd one that would make their package manager.
But if we all agreed early on, one one packaging format (which of course would have to go through many iterations to reach a stable state ) all package format wars would be over and in well implemented ecosystem of package managers of each distro, it would be also an somewhat interoperable one.
The package format is almost irrelevant TBH. Most packages are not interoperable between distros due to the versions and names of dependencies. That is not something that gets fixed by a standard package format. Packages don't even work well between different versions of the same distro. largely due to libc - anything that depends on that is built against a specific version and when you upgrade it you need to rebuild and install everything that depends on it. Similar problems exist for all compiled dependencies on a distro.
And while some packages of the same format can be installed on multiple distros (mostly those based of the same foundation) most cannot. This is what the newer package formats (like flatpack) are trying to solve - by including all dependencies inside the package.
So a standard format does not really solve those issues, so there is little advantage for one. At least not one of the old school formats. And the wars are not really over the format, they are over the tooling required for that format. At the end of the day RPMs, DEBs, and arch packages are just tarballs of files and some meta data (and there is even a tool that can convert between them - though anything with dependencies quickly becomes a complete mess). It is the build and install tooling that makes all the difference.
Oh ... thx for the insight, it was a daydream anyways looks like the only solution is cloud native if one wants uniformity, still a bit hesitant to have a system so stable I can't change it's core filesystem.